Chapter 20: Churching the Ungodly

Credits

Chapter 7 of the author's Navvyman, which Coracle Press published in 1983. It appears in the Victorian Web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

Directions

Numbers in brackets indicate page breaks in the print edition and thus allow users of VW to cite or locate the original page numbers.

Text in italics contains the words of the author's father, who became a navvy in 1903.

Non-bibliographic notes appears as text links.

The source of much of the material should be clear from the text, If the name of a single-work author (like Barrett, or Anna Tregelles,
or Katie Marsh) is mentioned in the text, the title of the book can be
picked out from the bibliography. In addition, a list of sources appears at the end of each chapter

'Navvies,' John Ward once said, 'are not, like Hodge, priest-ridden, for
religion is a thing they know little of.'
Navvies, said every Christian, are godless pagans heading
headlong for damnation. Christendom's counter-attack came in
two phases: pre-Navvy Mission Society missions, and the Navvy
Mission Society itself. '

The problem with the pre-Society missions was they were
unconnected and haphazard: even the heaviest dose of religion was
no good if the navvy never saw a Christian again. For this reason
they were pretty ineffective, in spite of the fact there were plenty of
them. In the late '60s, four separate missions competed for navvies
on the short Kettering-Manton line, where Daniel Barren was the
Bishop of Peterborough's appointee. He had a seven-mile parish
and three chapels with wooden belfries hung with bells which
chimed, not tolled, and flagstaffs for flying the cross of St George
on Sundays. He opened his mission to a congregation of forty-two
— of whom only the odd two were navvies, and one of them was so
drunk he had to be led away, protesting he'd heard it all before — in
jail.

What the Society offered when it came was a continuity of effort,
aim, and house-style. Like booking into an international hotel you
always knew what to expect on an Navvy Mission Society job. The trouble, then, was
navvies liked the amenities that were offered more than the religion
that was preached.

I never heard any one say anything against the Navvy Mission. It
was a blooming good thing. They were always preaching at you at
dinner time, that was all. I didn't want no bugger preaching at me
while I was eating my bit of snap.

Nor did they always like what was preached at them — a
[200/201] Christianity stripped to its Jewish and Iranian origins, full of
eastern demonology and the promise of pain to come. It was this
threat of never-ending violence against the person that most
offended navvies: violence against people who never asked to be
created — to be set up and knocked down like coconuts in a cock-shy
— and then be tortured with inhuman cruelty for trivial offences in a
pitifully short life in which they were chiefly preoccupied with
staying alive. It was a kind of terrorism: people were terrorised into
being Christian. Except many weren't, and wouldn't be.

'Do you mean to say,' a navvy asked the Rev. Fayers, on the Lune
valley line in the '50s, 'that arter working on these railways, enough
to pull a feller's heart out, we'll be hard worked in the next world?'

'Yes,' said Fayers — and repeated it to Old Alice, a middle-aged
woman (prematurely old) bright in lindsey petticoats. Old Alice
didn't believe him, either.

'Why I goes about the country for the good of old England,' she
argued, 'I puts up with all they put upon me, and when navvies
slope me, I bears it all, and shan't go to a bad place.'

'Jesus says no one can get to heaven but by him,' Fayers argued
back, 'and the reason you hope to get there does away with Him
altogether.'

Apart from anything else it grated against a sense of fair-play.
Unfairness was bad enough on earth, in heaven it was intolerable.
'They certainly wonder', said one lay preacher, 'that God should
have made some rich and some so dreadfully poor.' Yet some
Christians like Katie Marsh seem to have had no concept of equality
at all, not even in death. Miss Marsh lived in constant terror she was
less holy than her mother who, in consequence, would be graded so
much higher than her in heaven's hierarchy they'd never meet again
in all eternity.

Most navvies, as well, disliked parsons. How could leaning on a
pulpit twice a week pay better than shifting two hundred and fifty
tons of muck? 'Many of them regard a clergyman as their natural
foe,' said the Rev. Munby, vicar of Turvey, in the early '70s. 'Once,
I heard a party of them say: "Look, here comes the parson. Let's
heave a truck at him.'"
In return many parsons disliked them. 'Too bad to go among,'
said a Baptist minister. 'Not an atom's worth of honesty among
them,' said the Rev Thompson, missionary on the South Devon
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line, 1840s. 'Vile and immoral characters,' intoned the Rev Sargent,
missionary on the Carlisle-Lancaster, also in the '40s.
Navvies, on the other hand, were much more open to parsons'
wives and daughters, untouchable in muck-long frocks, not unlike
pedestals. In return, by accepting them, those wives and daughters
made navvies more acceptable to society by changing people's
perceptions of them. And a sense of acceptance by society must
have made the navvy more receptive to society's religion.

Pre-Navvy Mission Society, there was Anna Tregelles (whose book, Ways of the
Line, inspired the nameless authoress of Life or Death) and, above
all, Katie Marsh. Contemporary with the Mission there was
Elizabeth Garnett and the dozens of women who did the Society's
donkey-work — from not-quite-gentlewomen like Katherine
Sleight to bluebloods like the Countess of Harewood. Supreme
among them, the navvy's arch-friends, were Katie Marsh and
Elizabeth Garnett.
Miss Marsh never married and though Mrs Garnett obviously
did, her husband died on their honeymoon soon after her wedding.
Both were daughters of Anglican clergymen.

Katie Marsh, born in 1818 in Colchester, was always unintimidated by the great, accustomed as she was to the illustrious of the
land through her father's connections, by marriage, with the
nobility. She had, she said, no politics (just anti-Gordon-ics and
anti-Bradlaugh-ics) though that didn't stop her telling Mr Gladstone to defy the electorate of Northampton and throw Bradlaugh
out of Parliament. 'Save our country from the Apostle of Atheism,'
she told him.

At first she seemed an ordinary spinster-daughter of the
parsonage and it was the shock of being thirty that turned her into
one of the foremost evangelists of her day, influential both in
Britain and the USA. Navvies were only a brief bit of her life: she
knew them only when they came to re-erect the Crystal Palace near
her father's parish of Beckenham and later when the Army Works
Corps was drafted from there to the Crimea. By then she was in her
late thirties, plump and plain, not unlike the later Victoria, with
ballooning frocks and ballooning face.

Beckenham Rectory, a small mansion set in lawns dotted with
disc-like flower beds, overlooked the rural hills of Norwood.
Beckenham itself, still a village, housed some of the Crystal Palace
navvies. Miss Marsh first met them one Sunday evening in March
1853, on the pretext of seeing a sick parishioner.
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'Harry ain't here now,' said the navvy who opened the door.

Could she wait?

'Well, you can if you like,' said the man, 'but we're a lot of rough
uns.

'I don't mind that,' said Miss Marsh.

Nobody, least of all ladies tea-cosied in crinolines, spoke to
navvies like that. Navvies were brutish half-men looming on the
edges of mankind. The prognathous jaw that bit. The impact of her
book about them, English Hearts and English Hands, was the
greater because of her refinement and femininity (the impact of a
book by a professional Christian, a clergyman in a stove-pipe hat,
would have been that much weaker). From her book it was clear
navvies were not Neandertals without the body hair: they were
kind and manly, shy and simple (too ill-educated to be politicised
like artisans), guileless but beguiling. Her book was a major navvy
turning point. A turning point for others, too: Aggie Weston, foundress of the Sailors' Homes,
admitted the book inspired her to begin her work for the Royal Navy.

Elizabeth Hart, later Mrs Garnett, was born at Otley in
Yorkshire in 1839. Mr Hart, like Mr Marsh, was a vicar but more
poorly connected. Where Miss Marsh spoke to most of the
English-speaking world, Elizabeth Hart spoke mainly to navvies;
where Miss Marsh scolded Prime Ministers, Mrs Garnett scorned
the socialists of the Navvies' Union.
Elizabeth Hart (Mrs Garnett) was a natural-born organiser,
unasked, of other people's lives. If her husband, a clergyman, hadn't
died on their honeymoon she would without a doubt have
terrorised some hapless parish into Christianity through unbending
good example and unending chiding. A small, strong-jawed,
strong-willed woman; irrefragable; strong with the robustness of
simplicity: the world's complexities always puzzled her.

Laws, she thought, were quite literally based on the laws of
Christ yet it was awful to see, every day, his laws superseded by
men's. 'Look at the newspapers', she would say, 'and they are full of
disagreements and strikes, and quarrelling, everyone trying to get
all for themselves. Men think everything can be done by law, and so
they make laws until they law away all an Englishman's
self-responsibility and freedom.'

Strife distressed her. Why must people argue when Christ
instructed them to be friends ? 'Dear Friends,' she pleaded, 'do let us
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navvies stick together, and be pleasant to one another. Give your
contractors a civil bow. It's a very heavy burden to plan how to get
you work to pay your wages. You know how hard many of these
men's lives are,' she went on, turning to the contractors. 'Think for
them. See there's plenty of skilly, and a dry cabin with a good
tea-can stove for wet weather, and spin out the work in winter.'
But if she was disingenuous she was also open-hearted with a
deep abiding affection for these big and wayward men. She was
genuinely appalled at their sightlessness in endangering their souls.
How could men care so little for eternity, they wouldn't lace their
boots to walk half a mile to be saved? So she hectored, scolded,
nagged and bullied them. At times she sounded like a schoolmistress in charge of an unaccountably drunken hockey team; but she
never looked down on them and her loyalty to them never
slackened.

'We trust that you will feel when you receive this,' she told them
in the first issue of the Letter, 'there are those in the world who love
you still. Hitherto, as a class, the Navvies have not been duly cared
for. That day is past.'

She was often — she was usually — indignant at their conduct and
always shocked at any lack of pride in a navvy's calling. She called
them 'mates'. She called herself a 'navvy'.
They were her entire life.

I was for many years,' she said in 1898,
'the unpaid clerk. Librarian, Editor, Drawing Room Speaker, etc,
besides being one of the Committee and Managers of the Society. I
have never been paid one penny,' she went on, 'and if ever I get so
poor that I have to be paid, it will be "good-bye" and you will not
see me again. No, I will work for the love of Christ, and for the love
of you, or not at all.'

To many she was the Mission: the one person
they really knew (apart from the missionaries) because for nearly
forty years she nagged them endlessly in the Letter, the Society's
official magazine, which she edited all that time.

Until 1893 it was, more properly, the Quarterly Letter to
Navvies/rom the Navvy Mission Society. That year Men on Public
Works was substituted for Navvies in accordance with the new
reality. Navvies now shared public works with black-gang men and
other trades, all in need of saving. It was a small green-backed
pamphlet only ever called the Letter, Navvies' Letter, Quarterly
Letter or the Green 'Un. Its colophon was a diamond shape made of
a round-nosed shovel, a pick, an axe, a saw, and a pan, with an open
Bible in the middle. At first its bold lettering — of which there was a
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lot: it was an emphatic publication — was in a heavy square-serif
Wild West typeface which gradually thinned down as the magazine
matured.

Mrs Garnett always suspected people read it, like the Chinese,
from back to front. At the back were the endless lists of dead and
injured and the scandal sheet: who'd eloped with whom, who'd
sloped who, who'd gone missing, whose children were in the
workhouse. At the front was the epistle-like 'letter' itself, often
from Mrs Garnett, often from a guest writer. It was always
uplifting.
Drink was its big theme ('How many bundles of meat have the
Bobbies walked off with this summer?' Mrs Garnett wondered in
1881, deploring another year of drunkenness) and it frequently
carried moral tales, dreadful warnings, true-life confessions and
recipes for cooling drinks for alcoholics wanting to dry out.
In its summer 1903, edition it told the tale of a drunkard who cut
his throat. He lay on his back, a look of dumb craving in his eyes, as
his friends and relatives crowded round his death bed. "Do you
want a minister?" asked the doctor. The man shook his head.'

' "Would you like a prayer said?" He moved his lips but no sound
came. He was dying fast, and they could not make out his dying
wish. The doctor stooped and put his ear down to the man's mouth,
but he could not hear what he said. At last the man took his fingers
and fairly pinched the wound close, and feebly said, "Doctor, for
Christ's sake, give me another glass.'"

Then there was W-P-, a drunkard who died of drink. The
autopsy showed his heart weighed only two ounces instead of eight.
'It was dried up with that stuff called whiskey. I thank my God He
has kept me from the cursed cup.'

The Letter also printed what must be history's least sung
anti-booze ballad, so appalling it could only damage sobriety's
reputation. (To make it worse it was written by a Scot but attributed
in the chorus to an Englishman.) It went to the tune "The Days We
Went A-Gipsying":

Chorus:

Yes, I am an English navvy, but, oh, not an English sot,
I have run my pick through alcohol, in bottle, glass, or pot,
And with the spade of abstinence, and all the power I can,
I am spreading out a better road for every working man.

Sometimes they printed useful hints, like how to stop bleeding. On
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the covers were the job lists that were, in fact, the navvy's best
source of information about new jobs, old jobs, and where to tramp
to next. These alone would have meant the Letter was widely read
and its print runs were always high — 155,000 copies of one issue in
1904, its highest ever. Even at the outbreak of the Great War
editions ran to a hundred thousand.

Mrs Garnett's involvement with the Mission was an accident of
time and place which brought her, free and uncommitted, to the
Lindley Wood dam where and when it began. She first saw the place
one Saturday evening after dark in the fall of '71, when it was
already cold with the coming winter. The gutter trench was being
sunk, lit by the glare of the pumping engine fires. Feeble lights
shone from the huts a mile or so away. The shingled church with its
high pitched roof stood in a clearing in the woods above them. She
thought she might be in Canada. It was a place she could never
forget; the red huts in the sun, she remembered, and the wood itself
blue with harebells.

The Mission was not yet founded though its founder, the Rev
Lewis Moules Evans, was already at work at Lindley, already ill
with tuberculosis, and the idea for it had already been given him by
a navvy he met in a third-class railway carriage somewhere in the
north of England.

'Outlaws, sir,' the navvy told him, 'that's what
we are. Wanderers on the face of the earth, and outcasts from
society. Decent people, them as lives in towns and villages and has
homes of their own and no occasion to tramp, they gets a notion
into their heads as we belongs to a different breed from what they
do. They reckons us a sort of big strong beasts, very useful in our
way, but terrible dangerous and not of much account except for
strength.'

'Why, it was only t'other day as I heard a woman telling about a
railway accident, and she said as there was three men killed and a
navvy. We ain't men at all, we ain't got no feelings nor no souls,
nor nothing but just strong backs and arms and a big swallow for
beer.'
— A common story. A twentieth-century version is set in a pub in Wales:
'Who's that coming down the mountain, landlord?'
'Two men and a navvy.'

He was middle-aged, middle-height, a man who'd been a navvy
since he ran away from home as a boy. For years he'd been as
roving, drunk and dissolute as the rest. Then one Christmas a year
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or so ago he was dropping down through woods off the Yorkshire
moors, on tramp and lost. Ahead of him through the trees he saw
yellow candlelight spilling on the snow and he heard singing. A
ramshackle chapel filled with navvies. He went in, glad to rest in its
warmth, drowsy and half-listening until the clergyman said
something that transformed his life. 'What he said sounded so
strange and new to me,' said the navvy, years later in the third class
railway carriage. 'He told us about the Saviour who came at
Christmas time, all out of love for us: and he made it plain he meant
us. I felt as if I'd found some one who cared for me.'
The feeling transformed his life. He learned to read — he pulled a
Bible and prayer book from his pocket — though still at times he was
afraid. Places like that chapel were rare. 'What we want is more
work like that,' he said. 'Regular work. We're most of us very
ignorant, and it isn't likely as we can teach ourselves and we want
some one to come to us and teach us.'

Around this time Evans was given the living of Leathley, a hamlet
in the Washbourn valley where the Lindley Wood dam was being
built for Leeds Corporation. Evans used to walk alongside the
stream to the dam through the birches, oaks, foxgloves and bracken
of Lindley Wood. He called himself a navvy — 'I work on public
works.'

'I've come three miles to tell you something that will do you
good,' he once told a navvv. 'Won't you come a few yards to hear
it?'

'You see, sir, I've not got a hat,' said the man. 'It's not respectable
to go to a place of worship bareheaded: now if I'd a tile . . . '

The Christian Excavators' Union, which predated the Mission,
was also founded around this time at Lindley Wood. It was open
only to working navvies, who wrote the rules.

'I desire by God's help,' aspirants testified, 'to serve the Lord
Jesus Christ, and to lead others to do so.'

'To this end.'

'I promise to abstain from drink, swearing and ungodly living.'

'I promise never to neglect praying each morning and night.'

'I promise to keep the Lord's Day Holy and when possible to
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attend a place of public worship.'

Each man had three months to clear his debts, prove himself, and
make himself ready before he was accepted. Each carried a card and,
after 1883, a badge (two hands clasped over a Bible) proclaiming his
intentions. With it went the blue ribbon of temperance and the
white ribbon of purity. Mrs Garnett always said they were the salt
for Christ on public works. The Navvy's Guide said they were
spies.

The Christian Excavators' Union began with thirty-seven members, rose to about three
hundred in the early '80s and peaked at nearly seven hundred in
1913. By 1916 they were down to just over eighty. The War took a
lot of them, old age the rest.

Evans must have had the Mission in mind for some time though
he did nothing about it until the dam was nearly finished. Then he
began with a market survey, in 1875. Questionnaires were sent to
most of the public works he knew about. How many worked there ?
How many churches? How many clergymen visited them? How
many Sunday schools? How many day schools?
Less than half the engineers answered but from those who did
Evans calculated there were about forty thousand navvies in
England. With women and children that probably meant a total of
between fifty and sixty thousand people. Only three jobs had a
child's day school, three had a night school, only one had a Sunday
school.

Evans, already dying of tuberculosis, sheltered in Italy in the
winter of 1874-5, before writing an article — "Navvies and Their
Needs" — for the religious weekly, The Quiver, asking for help in
setting up a Mission. This he followed with a leaflet, also called
Navvies and Their Needs. 'Navvies,' it began, 'form a class by
themselves, isolated: First, by the nature of their work, which is
often carried on in places remote from towns or even villages.
Secondly by their roving habits: and Thirdly by the belief, which
commonly prevails among them, that they are looked upon as
outcasts.'
These were the key insights on which he built the working
philosophy of the Mission. More important (initially) than being
taught religion, navvies had to be taught they belonged. The roaring
and the uproar had to stop. They had to quieten down to listen. For
that they had to have more in their lives than drink and work. Evans
proposed giving them drink-free mission rooms and night schools
where they could learn to read and write, then libraries for when
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they could. (And not just religious books either. Geology,
unsurprisingly, was popular. Once the Mission was running
properly Mrs Garnett sent whole 250-volume libraries, complete
and catalogued, to most public works which had a missionary.)

It was to be a kind of nursing, a kind of therapy. But since the
navvy moved too fast to give it time to work, the therapy had to be
waiting for him wherever he went. What was wanted were mobile
missions and nimble missionaries to meet the fleeing heathen
wherever he ran.

Towards the end of 1877, Evans followed Navvies and Their
Needs (article and leaflet) with a flurry of hand-written and printed
appeals and within a few weeks — probably in November — he was
able to set up his new Society formally, with himself as its first
Secretary and the Bishop of Ripon on its first committee.
By the summer of 1878 Evans, no longer coughing up dark
blood, was fit enough to travel to the dams at Cheltenham,
Denshaw, Fewston, and Barden Moor, fixing the society physically
on the ground. Early that autumn he was even fit enough to make
the sea-crossing to the Isle of Man Railway where, in spite of the
sea, in spite of mountain air, soft dark gouts of blood began welling
up into his mouth again, leaving him pallid and enfeebled, too weak
to speak at that year's Church Congress in Sheffield. The Dean of
Ripon spoke for him.

'Navvies are looked upon with suspicion,' the Dean told
Congress, 'and are treated as if they were the wildest and the worst
of beings — the poachers, the drunkards, the Sabbath-breakers, the
brawlers and blasphemers, the adulterers, and heathen of the
district. Thus a bad name is given to them, which they reciprocate,
and keep themselves to themselves.'

Evans told everybody else — whatever he told himself — his lungs
were sound and getting better. All he had to do was keep clear of
damp. In November, which was both cold and clammy, he insisted
on travelling to a Christian Excavators' Union meeting in Ripon and on the way home he
had to wait in the cold on Otley railway station, pacing about in the
oil-lit darkness, breathing wet Yorkshire air. As soon as he could he
saw a doctor, afterwards telling his friends he was still on the mend.
He died suddenly early in December and they buried him in his
own graveyard, followed by mourning navvies. He was thirty-two.
But his society was safely founded in spite of the contractors,
engineers and city corporations who wished it wasn't. 'Of an
evening the men should be in bed,' said one engineer. 'They are
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better without reading.'
'Again and again,' Mrs Garnett recalled, years later,

we were
refused even a bare old building for a day school (even though a
friend was responsible for all expense) and we showed them the
School Board Schools (just started) and the Parochial Schools both
refused to admit our children on account of the room limit. It was
hard to bear. Insults are not pleasant to the flesh, wrong motives
were imputed and on all sides suspicion, and derision our portion,
but if a work be God's, it will go on.

And go on it did. Within a year or so the Mission had its own
house-style that lasted to the end. You always knew what to expect
on a Mission job: a lay missionary (preferably ex-navvy) and a
mission room, a library, a room to smoke and read in; schools for
children; bible readings, concerts, tea parties and meat teas. The
missionary, as well, was ready-made to run Sick Clubs, savings
schemes, first aid and even violin classes.

Navvy Mission Room. Click on thumbnail for larger image.

Everything centred on the Mission Rooms: wooden huts
furnished with wooden pews and harmoniums, heated in winter by
iron stoves with long thin flues. In place of altars there were
wooden pulpits draped with cloths embroidered with the Navvy Mission Society's
entwined initials. On the walls were posters: 'Dedicating the
Temple', 'Christ at the Feast', 'The Gracious Call'. Gothic-lettered
texts read: 'By grace are ye saved', 'Learn from me for I am meek
and lowly in heart', 'Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His
righteousness'. [At least one mission hut survived, at least until 1980, at Hutton Roof on the
Thirlmere pipe track of the north Lancashire fells. Until 1980, it was the Village Hall.]

To the Victorians the Mission was eminently worthy. It listed the
Primate among its patrons, as well as the Archbishop of York, most
of the English bench of bishops and sundry Lords and gentry. No
navvy, however, sat on its committee and only one woman ever did:
Mrs Garnett. Yet in spite of the male upper classes on top, at the
bottom it was run by women and working men.
The Society, essentially, was a loose collection of local Navvy
Mission Associations coordinated from a central office. For many
years this was wherever the Secretary lived — Ripon sometimes,
Leeds and Warrington at others — until the Society took permanent
desk space in the cellar of Church House, in the quad next to
Westminster Abbey (image), in 1893. The central office, mobile or fixed,
paid only a third of any mission's costs, and a third of every
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missionary's eighty pounds a year wages: the rest was found locally
by the local Navvy
Mission Association — by cajoling contractors and city corporations,
through public subscriptions and drawing room fund raisings. It
was here middle-class women were pre-eminent.

Katherine Sleight, at first, was typical: a widow of private means
attracted to the Mission when the Hull-Barnsley railway came near
her home in Newint. She busied herself on the new Hull dock and
railway, handling the Distress Fund in the hard times. She became
a-typical when the loss of her private income made her take a
salaried job as the Society's Association Secretary in London. She
did well — doubling the number of bodies associated with the
Mission, opening a fund to pay the wages of a nurse on the
Thirlmere dam — but in time she got very fat and her feet became
agonisingly tender (often she had to stop in the street and change
her outdoor boots for carpet slippers.)
On Christmas Eve 1897, she took to her bed clearly dying of
dropsy and heart and liver disease. Beef tea, milk and oysters were
all she could swallow and the swelling of her limbs grew grotesque.
Finally her mind gave way and she thought she was back in Hull
talking to her dead mother. She died in 1898, aged forty-six.

Left: Navvy Mission Room and Missionary. Right: Navvy Smith

Click on thumbnails for larger images.

Missionaries were black-suited, white-shirted, dark-tied working men who in summer wore straw boaters with a dove of peace
badge pinned to the hat band. The whole Society, naturally in
Victorian England, was very class-biased and once the navvy
swapped his moleskin for semi-broadcloth he crossed into another
lonely life. The navvies he left distrusted him as one of the others:
the others refused to accept him as one of them. Ordination —
self-betterment by class-hopping — was discouraged. David Smith
was typical.

As a missionary he was nicknamed Navvy Smith and later — to his
evident disgruntlement — Daddy Smith. He was born in 1866 in
Newhaven, Sussex, where his father, a smith by trade as well as
name, sub-contracted the iron-work in the new harbour. From
Newhaven the family moved to Bristol where docks were building
at Portishead, Shirehampton, and Avonmouth. Navvy Smith
started work there, carrying bricks at the bottle works, and then
carrying mason's tools to and from the blacksmith's shop on the
New Dock.
Navvy Smith, born in the '60s, became a Christian in the 70s, a
smith in the '80s, a missionary in the '90s. In 1888 he was smithing
on the Ship Canal when he met the Rev Robert Grimston, the
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Canal's chaplain (later the Mission's Secretary), and the man who
did more to alter his life than anybody else save William Perry, a
squire's gardener near Bristol, who first converted him to
Christianity. At the time he met Grimston, Smith was pushing an
injured man home in a wheelbarrow. Grimston offered an
unusually ineffectual hand before going off, more usefully, to
commandeer a locomotive. Later, Navvy Smith became one of his
missionaries on the Great Central, running the Good Samaritan
Home for tramp navvies at Bulwell, north of Nottingham.

After that Navvy Smith ran missions at the Catcleugh dam in
Northumberland, the Privett tunnel in Hampshire, at Sodbury
tunnel, at Shirehampton docks and finally in 1906 and for the next
twenty years in Birmingham. For four years until the War closed it
in 1916 he was joint-editor of the Public Works Magazine (a
missionary-level version of the Letter, as far as we can tell).

Tom Cleverley (sometimes spelled — and presumably pronounced — Cleaverley) was born a navvy at Penarth docks in 1855.
For ten years or so he wandered about the country working first as a
nipper then a full-blown navvy on railways, docks and dams until
finally, all unknowingly, he wandered into the Lindley Wood
settlement and a different way of living.

'In those days,' said Mrs Garnett, 'Sunday was called Hair-cutting and Dog-washing Day — hair cutting in the morning, dog
washing in the afternoon, and a free fight in the evening.' One
Sunday she met Tom Cleverley, at Lindley Wood, taking his dog
for a walk. 'Now, Tom,' said she to him, 'will you come to the Bible
class?'

'No,' said Tom, 'I'm going for a walk with my little dog.'

'I believe you care more for that dog than for your own soul,' Mrs
Garnett told him.

For Tom Cleverley that was the turning point of his life. He went
to the Bible class, became a Christian, then a missionary. As a
missionary he worked at the Cheltenham dam, on the Oxted-Groomsbridge, on the Ship Canal, and on the Great Central.
Within a couple of years of its founding the Society had
twenty-one full-time missionaries, a figure which went up to
fifty-four by the century's end. Numbers then steadied at
fifty-three before dropping to forty in 1915.

The Society was always tremulous for success and counted wins
and losses in a curiously actuarial way — lotting up lists of statistics
about the number of people going to Bible classes, prayer meetings,
[212/213]
confirmations, and Sunday services. But if simple arithmetic tells us
little, how effective was the Mission?
To begin with the police always vouched for Mission jobs. Crime
dropped when missionaries turned up. The Mayor of Ludlow even
put a figure on it: police court cases were cut by two-thirds when
the Mission opened on the Elan pipe track. Christianity didn't
break out spectacularly — it didn't throughout the country — but
most people on public works were Christian, in a confused
non-sectarian way, in the end. Navvies were christianised, if not
churched.
'Looking back over fifty years what changes one can see,' said
Navvy Smith, in 1923.

The navvy is a far more sober man today; he
is better dressed, better educated, takes a keener interest in his social
well-being and enjoys a status in human society which he never
thought of years ago. Who will deny that this is the outcome of
Christianity and Labour marching hand in hand?
[213/214]

Sources

[Note: Full citations for works cited by the name of the author or a short title can be found in the bibliography.]

The Ward quotation is from his Justice article, already referred to.
Munby is from Former Days at Turvey. Jenour, Thompson and
Sargent spoke to the 1846 Committee. Mrs Garnett's belief that laws
should be based on the laws of Christ is from NL 61, Sept 1893.

The Letter's change of name is from the 16th Annual Report,
1893. That people read them, like the Chinese, back to front is from
Quarterly Letter to Navvies 4, June 1879. Mrs G asked how many bundles of meat had been
carried off in Quarterly Letter 12, June 1881. The drunkard who cut his throat is
from Quarterly Letter to Men on Public Works too, June 1900. W-P- is from Quarterly Letter to Navvies 42, Dec 1888, and the song is from number 8, June 1880.

The founding of the Navvy Mission Society is from Quarterly Letter to Navvies 3, March 1879, and The
Quiver, 3rd Series, Vol 12, 1877. The founding of the Christian Excavators Union is from
Quarterly Letter to Navvies 19, March 1883, and 20, June 1883: Quarterly Letter to Men on Public Works 137, Sept 1912. A copy
of the leaflet, Navvies and Their Needs, is bound in with the first
and second editions of the Letters in the ICF library.

The Dean of Ripon's comments are from: "The Church's Work
Among the Navvies, Being a Paper Read Before the Church
Congress, held at Sheffield, October jrd, 1878, by the Very Rev
W H Fremantle (Dean of Ripon)" A copy can be found between
the first and second editions of the Quarterly Letter to Navvies in the ICF Library.

Mrs Garnett reminisced about the Mission's early troubles in Quarterly Letter to Men on Public Works 117,
Sept 1907.

Navvy Mission Society office space in London is from 16th Annual Report, 1893.
Katherine Sleight's story is from Quarterly Letter to Men on Public Works 81, Sept 1898. Navvy Smith's
is from no. 170, Jan 1923: and no. 188, July 1927. Tom Cleverley's
is from no. 171, April 1923, and Annual Meeting Speeches.

Navvy Smith's belief that Christianity and Labour changed
public works is from Quarterly Letter to Men on Public Works 170, Jan 1923.